This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

Anger at trade deals propelled Donald Trump to victory

Working-class whites were enraged at the Clinton couple about two trade deals that cost a great many jobs over the past 20 years.

Donald Trump addresses the final rally of his 2016 presidential campaign at Devos Place in Grand Rapids, Michigan on November 7, 2016. (JEFF KOWALSKY / AFP/GETTY IMAGES)

By John R. MacArthur

Tues., Nov. 29, 2016

Nearly every liberal I know is horrified by the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president. I share their anguish, but right now they seem to be lunging at explanations intended mainly to make themselves feel better: FBI director James Comey's late revelations concerning Hillary's private server emails; an unexpected eruption of racism against Barack Obama, sexism aimed at Hillary Clinton; Facebook's mass distribution of lies like Pope Francis's false endorsement of Trump; the blatant unfairness of the Electoral College; a fundamental American craziness exemplified by its fanatical gun owners — the list is long.

I don't disagree that these factors were significant in a contest decided by so few votes. Somehow, though, liberal commentators have mostly refused to point the finger at the principal reason for Trump's shocking victory. Working-class whites, both men and women, were enraged at the Clinton couple — and to some extent Obama and the Democratic Party — about the two trade deals that cost them the most jobs over the past twenty years: NAFTA and Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China.

That these two agreements hastened the departure to Mexico and China of many hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of manufacturing jobs is no longer in dispute. New scholarship by mainstream economists has reinforced the eyewitness observations by journalists who have chronicled the steady disintegration of towns and cities across America’s Rust Belt, as well as in the less unionized South. From the Economic Policy Institute, to MIT's David Autor, to Yale's Peter Schott, the tally of economic dislocation caused by trade agreements is large and its political impact obvious.

I covered the gradual shutdown of the Autolite spark-plug plant in Fostoria, Ohio; by 2012 the plant's production had moved almost completely to a new facility in Mexicali, Mexico, where cheap labour is plentiful and NAFTA protects Autolite's investment. Fostoria lies partly in Wood County, which in the 2012 election voted 51.3 per cent for Barack Obama against Mitt Romney's 46.5 per cent. This year Wood County went 50.9 per cent for Trump and 42.4 per cent for Clinton.

Keep in mind that the lost income and status of factory workers isn't the only cause of resentment. The collateral damage — to public schools dependent on property taxes paid by the factories, to Main Street stores and car dealerships that have fewer customers, to local civic organizations and sports teams with less funding and volunteers, to local suppliers that serviced the plants — has been immense.

Article Continued Below

Multiply Fostoria by several thousand and you've got a depth of alienation that leads to Trump, who, although he calls himself a free trader, understood that NAFTA encapsulated all the pent-up rage responsible for getting him elected — “NAFTA is the worst trade deal maybe ever signed anywhere,” he hammered again and again.

When he taunted prospective black voters with the slogan “What have you got to lose?” by voting Trump, he was also speaking to unemployed and underemployed whites. When these unhappy people were exhorted by the Clintons to “retrain” for the “new global economy” they took it as insulting condescension.

And what of Obama's role in this catastrophe? After denouncing NAFTA during the 2008 Ohio primary in order to wound Hillary — he claimed it had cost Ohio 50,000 jobs and the country a million — he dropped the subject and then turned free trader. Against all tactical political logic, he continued to press for adoption of the Trans-Pacific Partnership while Bernie Sanders attacked the agreement and Hillary disendorsed it. Did he think voters in the Rust Belt are deaf?

Sanders's critique of NAFTA and TPP — more authentic than Trump's — is a big reason he carried the Wisconsin and Michigan Democratic primaries against Clinton. In 2002, even the less than brilliant free trader George W. Bush recognized the political value of slapping temporary tariffs on imported steel when he needed to shore up support in steelmaking states like Ohio and West Virginia. In 2004, despite his Iraq debacle, he squeaked by John Kerry in the Electoral College and was re-elected president thanks to Ohio.

A renunciation of TPP by Obama at the 2016 Democratic Convention in Philadelphia, along with a full-throated recognition of Rust Belt pain, could have carried the day.

Now we have the Mad Hatter as president, a profoundly unstable hypocrite advised by the monstrous Newt Gingrich -- the same Gingrich who provided essential Republican support to Bill Clinton in his fight to pass NAFTA in 1993. God help Alice — she's trapped in Trumpland.

John R. MacArthur is the publisher of Harper's Magazine and the author of The Selling of &quot;Free Trade.&quot;

The Toronto Star and thestar.com, each property of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited, One Yonge Street, 4th Floor, Toronto, ON, M5E 1E6. You can unsubscribe at any time. Please contact us or see our privacy policy for more information.

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com